The Secret Rapture
Hare is a George Bernard Shaw for our time: an intellectual socialist whose work gets criticized as “talky” because it contains ideas and “doctrinaire” because those ideas are left-wing. But Shaw’s time must have been more hopeful than the present, because his work was fundamentally exuberant. Whether critiquing class prejudice or war capitalism or relations between the sexes, it’s clear the playwright thought things could actually change for the better.
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Whereas Hare’s work, as robust as it is intellectually, carries a whiff of being a loser’s complaint about how the bad guys have won. More, it often includes an assessment of how and why they will always win–a sort of anatomy of catastrophe. It’s a position both infuriating and understandable given his flowering in Thatcherian England. Hare diagnoses problems brilliantly, connecting politics to personal morality in unexpected ways, but when it comes to thinking about solutions he just throws up his hands.
In this very smart production, Bohnen maintains the balance Hare himself strikes between Isobel’s apparent rightness and the legitimacy of everyone else’s claims on her: he even shows the brittle Marion her share of sympathy. The actors resist every temptation to stereotype their characters, going beyond the text to convey the nuances of sexual tension and of the scraping misery when marital love disappears. Kati Brazda, who bears a striking physical resemblance to Jodie Foster, gives a performance that draws on a likewise similar arsenal of acting tools: intelligence, naturalism and the ability to be still, coupled with a certain inaccessibility that might be coldness or just reserve. It works brilliantly with Isobel, a latter-day Saint Joan for whom right trumps loving or joyful.
